To draw in one person with whom you work, use a private discussion with that person. Make sure they know how to set notifications so that they receive an email when there are any changes.

To draw a department, etc in, create a program using your platform as the communications platform. The program can be a course. I did an entire training plan program on ours one year and our area had the highest # of interactions that year. Of course, I went department by department giving them 45 minute, interactive courses on where the training plan info was AND how to use the platform.

I create a weekly newsletter that is manually-curated from all the new content for that week. I send it to the entire company. This helps entice people that don't log in regularly to log in for specific content pieces, start following key influencers and gets them used to using the platform.

One thing you could do is get with your HR department and find out the demographic breakdown of the employees from Baby Boomers thru Millennials.As each group focuses on different elements for meaningful engagement, you could then adjust your plan for Community participation accordingly.

While not a magic pill for participation, knowing your audience and what motivates them, AND then looking to align those motivational elements to the broader company social values and/or business strategy can drive high levels of activity.

Sounds great. One thing you can do as well: Use a little Gamification. When starting your intranet create an area where customers can e.g. post their favourite recipies. Then say: we will publish the most liked and commented recipies in a book or as a special company paper (online). It is an easy way to get the employees in the platform and show the functionalities.

Advocates/Champions Program: Invite team members from all levels of the organization to join an internal committee where they participate in the change taking place. When people feel included and empowered to drive the direction of the community, they're far more likely to adopt it and spread it among their teams. This also helps you, the community manager, to delegate some of the responsibility of moderating the community when you don't have funds to hire another person to help you. You can give your Advocates special badges that indicate they're a "go-to" person in the community. Requirements of becoming an Advocate are usually one or two training sessions on community management and monthly meetings where the Advocates can get together with you to discuss what's working well, what can be improved, and what to do next.

Live Training Sessions: Not just how to, but why we're doing this and what's in it for them. Offer in-person or webinar-based training sessions broken up into different levels, such as Basic, Group, and Projects training. You can always record these, but I find that including a 15-minute live Q&A session really helps people get clarification on some of the things that may not be explained in enough detail during the training. Another option is to offer "office hours" where people can dial in or meet in person to ask specific questions and get more personalized assistance. Be sure to take notes - there will be valuable knowledge shared here that should go into your community's Help section.

Share Success Stories: Some teams will adopt Jive quickly and identify its value - report on these success stories to the rest of the community so that they can learn by example. If you can get a 10 mintue spot in a company meeting for them to share their use case, even better. This positive reinforcement will encourage others to work towards gaining recognition for innovative ways of getting work done. Win for them, win for you, win for the company.

One thing we have continually done here at RadioShack is to just always be involved. As Community Managers, we set the expectations. In our internal community, we use 2 community managers and both of us are some of the most followed individuals. We use this influence to encourage engagement by being in and active, every day!

All good point, that we'll take into account when we're beginning to introduce Jive to everyone. One of the things we're focusing on is creating User Journeys, just to outline what you can use Jive for and how its similar/dissimilar to SharePoint, DMS and other workday 'tools'.

We're also breaking the myths behind Jive and social media, which is one of the main setbacks we've been getting with our Use Cases.

I think this is a massive fundamental piece of any community -a shared knowledge base with definitions and guides. These can be anything from jive descriptors/definitions to how to methods or walkthroughs. This can always be a good chunk of work at the front end, but once you get a few key users behind you they can help drive this value home

Dear Joan Coury I don't understand what you mean by "want to learn about" the Community itself (technical things and functional things: how to post and when do I post) or about the topic of the community?

Our community is (i think) unique, in that we've had in place multiple intranets for employees based on geography. Now we are trying to push for 1, for all employees globally - and its a challenge.

So we need to help change our employees behavior. They are used to the outdated intranets that don't really allow for collaboration between employees but rather just push out information.

In an effort to see what would help make their user experience "user friendly" - I wanted to put together a survey to ask them what would help them feel comfortable with the tool (jive) and help motivate them to change their "work behavior."

Maybe this was the wrong place to ask the question, but I was hoping someone might have already put together a survey for this to get responses or of course any other information to help motivate change in the community.

A survey is a good idea. But I would recommend not to aks open questions like: If you would have a wish free....." With that technique you provoke high expectations to the new intranet that it might could not fulfill.

It would be better to ask close questions like: "What would help organize your work better: searchable experts / working together with my colleagues in groups / .... / nothing of this (if you wish free expression of opinion then you could add a free text field to every question)

Then you see what your colleagues would appreciate with the new intranet and what kind of use cases you have to create first.

It's a while ago when we launched - we turned 5yrs old last month. We did a number of things to encourage adoption, here are a few:

We did not restrict access on the pilot, if you had a single sign on ID you could join in.

We built up a group of advocates who volunteer their time to promote the business value. That group is still in place and we hold biweekly calls to educate and share features with each other.

We set up non-business groups - Watercooler, Photography, Food etc.. and seeded them with some content and also encouraged people to create their own fun groups. As others have said that really helped people understand the platform in a safe way.

Part of the adoption plan included definition of the use cases and how Jive can be used to deliver business value and improve productivity. We found that if we had examples of real work it was much easier for people to adopt.